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Winter and spring were still battling it out in Krakow. An icy wind whipped across the bridges and occasionally a flurry of snow harried you down the street, snapping at your heels. But there were signs to show the cavalry was on its way. Daffodils had raised their heads above the parapet and there was a riot of winter jasmine in the Planty, the park - once a moat - that encircles the old medieval capital of Poland. The tree of heaven opposite the church of Saints Peter and Paul was still entombed deep inside its branches but the faintest yellow-green fuzz had begun to blur the outline of willows on the banks of the River Vistula. Swans were racing along in the vernal currents.

I’d thought I was more than ready for spring when I left England but once in Krakow I found myself - perversely - willing winter to continue just a little while longer. Krakow is, by its very nature, a winter city. Its character is geared up for life in the freezer, for the frosty conditions in which the human spirit makes up for the lack of sun. This was somewhere where one should be huddling out of the cold, warmed by vodka and camaraderie and a smoky porcelain stove. There was something compulsive, engaging, about Krakow’s siege mentality, and spring, with all its brash coquetry, seemed oddly antipathetic.

Krakow was built for adversity. Thirteenth century fortifications still isolate the old part of town behind a three kilometre chain of double defensive walls, with 47 towers and seven main sentry gates. They are defences that have weathered centuries of invasions and occupations. But it was mostly down to luck that they, and the rest of the city, survived the twentieth century.

For the duration of the Second World War, Krakow was the Nazis’ Polish headquarters, with the notorious Nazi governor, Hans Frank, waging a campaign of terror from the royal castle on Wawel Hill. The Auschwitz concentration camp was engineered barely two hours from the city, to ‘process’ Krakow’s troublesome Catholic priests and intelligentsia, among them most of the professors from Krakow’s famous Jagellonian University. Then, as the Final Solution gathered momentum, 70,000 Jews were despatched there from the Krakow ghetto for extermination. The city was looted, its population decimated, but its buildings were spared.

Somehow the city also escaped bombing by the Allies, and now, miraculously, Krakow’s tallest buildings remain church spires - rather than sixties skyscrapers like elsewhere in Poland - and the city has a place on UNESCO’s list of the twelve most important historical sites in the world.

The enduring legacy of Krakow’s extraordinary capacity for survival, its tradition of stoical underground resistance and socio-political camaraderie, is a burgeoning café culture of steamy windows and smoke-filled cellars. This is a city where people still talk for hours; where the din of conversation rises exuberantly above the sound of musak and the rustle of newspapers. There are over 300 cafes and bars in the centre of old Krakow, most of them tucked away in the vaulted, dimly-lit cellars of the grand houses and palaces around the main square. But even those few cafes at street level wallow in an atmosphere of brumal gloom so dense that, even at midday, you have to peer at the menu to make it out. Krakow must be one of the few places in the world where you can breakfast by candlelight.

It’s a refreshing change from the Pret-a-Manger culture of London cafes, the insular, ambitious, on-the-hoof rush of western Europe. Here there is still a sense that good company is an end in itself, a cup of coffee can last for hours, and the waiter won’t badger you to move on or order something else. Inevitably, my visit to Krakow with my husband and two old friends became one long bar crawl.

We bought a chess-set from one of the stalls in the Old Cloth Hall in the main square and sat over it endlessly in one candlelit cellar after another. It was no normal chess-set. It was a game for three players, shaped like a truncated swastika, with chessmen in three different colours. I sat and read about Polish family tragedies while my friends engaged in battle.

Only in Poland, I thought, could such a twisted, tormenting game have been invented. No matter how adamant the players are at the start about the unfairness of collusion, two of them will irresistibly gang up against the third. I grew inured to their wails of outrage or jubilation; the ultimate two-way triumph, the loser’s embittered despair and the inevitable call for a re-match.

In the unfathomable twilights of these underground afternoons, the game became symbolic of the historical sagas I was reading. The board was the country of Poland - an enormous, indefensible plain. The players could represent any of the invaders in Poland’s history - Tartars, the Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Turks, Prussians, Swedes, Ukranians, Cossacks or Austrians. But the most obvious, especially when two surreptitiously ganged up to squeeze the life out of the other, was Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

It explained a lot about the Polish national character. When the game was over we moved café and the loser, by now totally humourless and in the advanced stages of paranoia, was placated with another round of bison vodka.

Not long ago this underground society in Krakow was exactly that. The cafes (few and far between until the 1990’s) were places where students and the intelligentsia railed together against the strictures of Martial Law and the laughable, cryable inefficiency of Communism. There was little, if anything, on the menu. Coffee was Turkish-style - boiling water poured onto spoonfuls of coffee-grounds and sugar, served in a glass. Now there are shiny new Gaggias spewing out cappucino and espresso into shiny white porcelain. There are show-case boxes of Twinings tea-bags; fresh milk; Viennese apple strudel and traditional Polish cheese-cake. Where once people exchanged information in whispers or in code, mobile phones jangle and students come to use that ultimate tool of free communication - the internet.

Not all the old cafes are simply cafes any more. Many have changed their signs to ‘restauracja’, their menus taking flight through the exotic landscape of Polish cuisine like birds let out of their cage. Emphasis is on the wild side - saddle of roe-deer, boar sausage and trotters, bison goulash, rabbit with juniper, jugged hare, pigeon pie, pike-perch quenelles, roast zander, trout, jellied carp, salmon carpaccio and salmon tartar, smoked eel, partridge, stuffed duck, fungi, wild blueberries, forest raspberry juice tea.

Almost every ingredient is farmed nowadays but it’s the thought that counts. A decade ago the palate was confined to tinned sardines and pickled cabbage. Now taste-buds can canter through traditional peasant fare like deer through a forest. If we are what we eat, then the Krakovites are reclaiming their country by serving it up in a hundred rich dishes of colossal proportions. Quite remarkably, considering the time-span, eating out in Krakow is a gastronomic delight. It’s as if thousands of frustrated chefs had been bent over the starting-blocks all this time, waiting for the pistol-shot of perestroika.

You can even, occasionally, get service with a smile instead of a derisive snort. Market stalls on the street sell everything from grapes to kiwis, basil to asparagus - luxuries never dreamt of ten years ago. Now, instead of queuing for hours in the hounding cold for something (anything), people take time to sniff an out-of-season cantaloupe melon or squeeze a ripening mango. Gone are the professional queuers you could pay to stand in line to get elbowed and sworn at on your behalf; gone is the risk of getting roughed over for bagging the best of a bad lot. Once in a while the stall-keeper in her Nora Batty housecoat and dyed-black hair will, almost accidentally, break into a pleasant expression. Decades of anger and angst are dissolving in the seductive warm water of open borders and personal liberty. Krakow is trying to relax.

But that’s not as straight forward as it sounds. For the younger generation, granted, it’s a piece of cake. Students from the University saunter about the main square in their platform shoes, bootleg jeans and black leather jackets without a care in the world. They’ve seen every latest Hollywood movie, their discos thump garage and rap. They are beautiful - cool, dark-eyed, broad-browed, fine-boned, intelligent, and though (or perhaps because) they’re reminded of Poland’s dark, repressive past to the point of exhaustion, their sights are on the bright, booming world of e-commerce, getting a job in Berlin, and deciphering the latest lyrics.

“I have a question for you”, begged a student in information technology who guided us round the old underground salt mines outside the city. There was a note of urgency in his voice. “Do you know ‘American Pie’? Can you tell me what means ‘chevvy’ and ‘levvy’?” And of course, I realised, feeling my age, he meant Madonna’s treacherous remake not the 1970’s Don Maclean classic.

Krakow’s students, who, 70,000 in all, make up a tenth of the city’s population, have taken to star-spangled capitalism like swans to the river. But it’s the teenagers of twenty years ago, the forty-somethings, who have begun to feel this glittering new world is lacking something; who are even growing wistful about the past; who feel they’ve been left in a backwater, a generation of bewildered political Januses.

“Democracy is boring”, shrugged my Polish friend Maria, a teacher in English at the University, over supper one evening before we set off for one of Krakow’s famous cabarets. We were drinking Chilean Gato Negro with our black sausage and Baltic beechwood-roasted salmon. “No one has initiative any more”, she was saying, “They don’t have the same imagination. 1980-84 - the period we had Martial Law - they were the best days for Poland, culturally-speaking. Everyone had energy. There was a real creative spirit. We were fighting for ideals, then, not chasing the latest consumer gimmick.”

Maria’s student days were a riot of rebellious pranks. She and her friends would spend all night hanging the letters S-O-L-I-D-A-R-N-O-S-C down the side of their hostel block or winding up the police with prank phone-calls.

The Soviet regime tried particularly hard and unsuccessfully - just like the Nazis before them - to crush the ‘bourgeois intelligentsia’ of Krakow. But the artists and musicians, poets and students and philosophers of the old town proved irksomely irrepressible. Like Berlin in the 1930’s, cabaret became a raucous and highly entertaining way of satirising the government. Roars of laughter would float up from the cellars to fill the town square. When the authorities issued an order for one particularly popular theatre to close, the letter was put to music and sung as the opening number of the next show.

The cabaret Maria took us to was a pale imitation of those scything performances of the 1970’s and 80’s. There were some silly love-songs and now and then an earthworm told a joke about farts and pollution and how the Nowa Huta steelworks had covered Krakow in shit.

Only one number seemed to relate to the present climate, to the strange new capitalist spring breaking over the city - the world of Madonna and MacDonalds and dot com millionaires. The song, which was an old Polish folk-song, told of an alchemist who’d spent his life obsessed with making gold. He was dying, a lonely, disenchanted old man. He was visited by a young girl he’d often seen from his window. Too late, he noticed she had beautiful, golden hair.

But the audience, unprepared for irony, chatted through it.

The weather began, inevitably, to thaw. We packed our bags and headed for the train. Rooks were busy building nests in the Planty under a leaden sky. Trams rattled by advertising ‘Italian Fashion’ and the new ‘Carrefour Hypermarket’. The first Tesco’s would be opening in a few months’ time. Winter was over but there was room for a twinge of regret, it seemed to me, and a little mournful Polish fatalism.

In the hall of the train station, a bronze statue of an old Jewish man laiden with battered suitcases reminds the modern traveller of that universal icon of Polish history, the refugee. Someone had drawn Nike logos on the side of his boots.

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